• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.195-206
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• 2022

Crack detection is essential for inspection of existing structures and crack segmentation based on deep learning is a significant solution. However, datasets are usually one of the key issues. When building a new dataset for deep learning, laborious and time-consuming annotation of a large number of crack images is an obstacle. The aim of this study is to develop an approach that can automatically select a small portion of the most informative crack images from a large pool in order to annotate them, not to label all crack images. An active learning method with difficulty learning mechanism for crack segmentation tasks is proposed. Experiments are carried out on a crack image dataset of a steel box girder, which contains 500 images of 320×320 size for training, 100 for validation, and 190 for testing. In active learning experiments, the 500 images for training are acted as unlabeled image. The acquisition function in our method is compared with traditional acquisition functions, i.e., Query-By-Committee (QBC), Entropy, and Core-set. Further, comparisons are made on four common segmentation networks: U-Net, DeepLabV3, Feature Pyramid Network (FPN), and PSPNet. The results show that when training occurs with 200 (40%) of the most informative crack images that are selected by our method, the four segmentation networks can achieve 92%-95% of the obtained performance when training takes place with 500 (100%) crack images. The acquisition function in our method shows more accurate measurements of informativeness for unlabeled crack images compared to the four traditional acquisition functions at most active learning stages. Our method can select the most informative images for annotation from many unlabeled crack images automatically and accurately. Additionally, the dataset built after selecting 40% of all crack images can support crack segmentation networks that perform more than 92% when all the images are used.